Castor by Shaun Young Guest Post & Excerpt!

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Hi peeps, we have debut author Shaun Young popping in today with his upcoming release Castor, we have a brilliant guest post and a great excerpt, so check out the post and enjoy <3 ~Pixie~

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Castor

by

Shaun Young

James Fisher’s memories of Earth are distant, replaced by the harsh realities of life on the planet Castor. As a “Half-Adapt,” James is one of many who were biologically engineered to survive conditions on Castor—and to labor for the benefit of the ruling class. Indentured to servitude, James has no way to defy or escape the severe caste system… until he meets Vidal Centa, his master’s nephew. The draw they feel toward each other is instant, powerful, and maybe even enough to move beyond the unyielding regulations of their society.

But not everyone blindly accepts the absolute power of the oligarchy. The Independence Society fights for freedom and equality, and since James shares in their ideals, he joins their ranks. Soon he’s faced with an impossible decision: continue the fight against the oppressors or choose the love of the young man who embodies everything the Society loathes. With a looming conflict threatening to tear the planet apart, James fears he cannot continue to fight if he wants to keep his relationship with Vidal.

Release date: 30th June 2016

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Shaun Young!

Lost in the Library of Babel

In 1941 the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called ‘The Library of Babel’. The story takes place in a universe which appears to consist solely of a vast library of books containing every possible 410-page combination of 22 letters and some basic punctuation. The library is inconceivably huge, and by definition must contain every piece of writing ever created and every piece of writing that ever could be created – including a completely accurate description of all of human history, past and future.

When I first read about Borge’s Library of Babel, I felt as if it was almost too good to be true even as a thought experiment. Is it really possible that combining random letters can result in the production of all human knowledge? Of course it is, just the same way that telling a computer to output all possible combinations of a given set of digits will result in it providing you with next week’s lottery numbers. The problem is that you’ll have billions of combinations to wade through in order to find the ‘correct’ one — and, of course, you’ll have no way of knowing when you’ve found the correct combination without already knowing the correct combination. Reading the future and recognising it as such are two very different things, it turns out.

Borge’s story focuses on the futile search for meaning among the Library’s vast sea of incomprehensible pages. Even knowing that according to the laws of probability they could spend their entire lives reading book after book without finding a single ‘real’ sentence (or even word), his characters are unable to give up their search for some ultimate truth. You could read that as a metaphor for a lot of things, but lately I’ve been thinking about it in terms of putting a book out into the world.

(I guess that would mean the Library is Amazon, although in that case Jeff Bezos is some sort of god. Actually, scratch that analogy…)

When I first started writing Castor, I felt that I needed to have some clear idea of what the story meant. Not in terms of plot or even character, but in that what-does-the-planet-represent-really, English class kind of way. I don’t tend to interpret books like that when I read them, but I began to worry that if I didn’t have some clear-cut meaning or message in mind when I wrote Castor it would ultimately end up meaning nothing at all.

I think science fiction is particularly vulnerable to intepretation anxiety. In a way we’re trained to read robots or clones as metaphors for some real-life human experience, no matter how tenuous the connection. Castor takes place on a distant planet whose inhabitants have divded themselves across biological lines: those who can naturally breathe the air and those who can’t. That’s got to mean something, right?

Only it doesn’t, really. Or it doesn’t to me, anyway, because that’s not the part of the book I was really interested in. But what if someone else read something into it? Shouldn’t I make sure they read it the ‘right’ way?

What I realised, eventually, is that the reader is the one who ultimately brings meaning to a story. That sounds obvious, and I guess it is obvious in a lot of ways, but it’s easy to lose yourself in the search for some kind of true and objective essence of a story that will mean the exact same thing to everybody.

See, the other thing about Borges’ Library is that every book is as meaningful as any other. What looks like a string of nonsense to you or I might turn out to be a work of genius in another language.  The meaning is in the act of interpretation, not of writing. As an author you have no control over what happens when someone picks up your book and begins to read. You can set up signposts and point the reader in the direction you hope they might go, but the Library is vast and there are (hopefully) many readers and only one of you. You can’t stand behind them all and tell them exactly how to decode the words on the page.

For me Castor will always have a special significance, but for you, the reader, it’s just one book among hundreds of thousands. Now that it’s almost out, I’ve realised that I’m excited to see how other people interpret it. I had my chance at giving it meaning – now it’s your turn.

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Excerpt

I MET Vidal on the first day he set foot on the surface of the planet. We talk about the war as if it’s this one thing that everyone experienced the same way, but that’s not exactly right. Everyone has their own beginning, and for me it all started with him.

It was hot as hell that day, and I was already worn out from the morning’s work. I lay down among the flower beds I’d been tending and tried to keep myself from dozing off. At the time I couldn’t understand why Dr. Niels bothered with the flowers. They weren’t like his adapted wheat and corn, which is what made him his fortune. They didn’t do anything. But he was meticulous about them, just like he was meticulous about everything, and it was my job to look after them.

I heard someone calling my name.

“James!”

It was Adam. I lay still, hoping he’d just stumble past me. His anger would burn itself out after a while—or if it didn’t, he’d give up looking for me and take it out on somebody else. “Where the hell did you get off to?”

He came crashing through the bushes separating one garden from the next, almost falling on top of me. “There you are! Did you not hear me shouting for you?”

I stood up quickly. I wanted to be on my feet if he went to grab me. “Yeah, I heard you. You’re a bit hard to miss.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

“What do you think?”

All right, it wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but I was getting fed up with him. And I wasn’t small anymore. If he wanted to give me a beating, he could expect to get a few bruises of his own in return.

He must have been more drunk than I’d thought, because he just scowled and tried to give me a halfhearted cuff. “Don’t talk back to me. And next time I call you, you’d better bloody well come. You hear me?” As always he didn’t bother waiting for me to say anything. He was one of those people who got the last word in by barreling ahead before you could reply. “The master’s looking for you. He’s got some job he wants doing.”

“What is it?”

“Why, are you getting choosy about the work you’ll do?” he said. He was one to talk, seeing as how I was doing most of his jobs as well as my own. “He asked for you in particular. Just go out to the back of the house; that’s all I was told.”

So much for my break. Adam turned around and made his unsteady way to our dingy little cabin at the back of the gardens. It was where I had lived since arriving on Castor. I couldn’t remember a single evening when I looked forward to going back to it.

~~~

COMING OUT of the gardens was a bit like stepping into another world. They were right in the middle of Scarborough plantation, just a stone’s throw from Dr. Niels’s house, but even so it felt like they were removed from the rest of it. I unlocked the gate and walked out into the main yard.

It was busier than usual. A couple of the house servants scurried past me, looking stuffy and uncomfortable in their starched uniforms. They were weighed down by heavy suitcases and bags. Someone was visiting, then. Or maybe a few somebodies, by the look of it. I wanted to stop them and ask what was going on, but they were in too much of a hurry and probably wouldn’t have told me much anyway. They hated anybody who worked outside the house, even though we were Half-Adapts just like them, and we hated them right back.

I stopped halfway across the yard and looked up at the roof of the house, hoping to catch a glimpse of my friend Femi. He’d been assigned to a work gang that was patching up the roofs of the house and some of the old barns. There was no sign of him, though, so he must have been taking a break somewhere.

The house was old. It could look decrepit sometimes, all gray stone and deep, brooding windows, but when the light hit it in just the right way, it had a kind of grandness about it that I always liked. It wasn’t ever a welcoming place, but then it wasn’t supposed to be. Not for me, anyway.

The servants’ entrance was at the back of the house, which was also where all of the deliveries were made. I figured there had been a new shipment of something that needed carrying into the gardens, but there were no boxes or crates waiting for me when I got there—just Dr. Niels, looking displeased behind the clear plastic of his breather.

“You took your time,” he said. He was a tall man, and dour as well, which made a lot of people afraid of him. Not me, though. You always knew where you stood with him. He wasn’t like a lot of the overseers, who’d make you practically grovel in front of them if you pissed them off. If he was going to punish you, he’d do it, and if he didn’t do it straight away, then you had nothing to worry about.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. That was another thing: he didn’t like hearing excuses.

He grunted and glanced at his watch. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my nephew has arrived from Pollux. It’s an unexpected visit, otherwise I would have had his rooms prepared for him. As it stands, things are… chaotic.”

I was so taken aback that I stared at him a bit more openly than was proper. In the eight years I’d been at the plantation, he had never once mentioned his family—and neither had anybody else.

“He’s requested a tour of the orchard. I’d show him around myself, but I have other guests arriving. You’ll have to do.” My stomach dropped. Showing some idiot from Pollux around the orchard so he could gawk at all the trees sounded like torture.

“Sir… I’ve got a lot of work to do already,” I said, which was about as close as I’d ever come to defying him.

“I’m sure Adam will survive for an hour or two without you.”

I said nothing. He wasn’t looking for a reply. I had my orders, so that was that.

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About Shaun

Shaun decided he was going to be a writer at the age of fifteen because it would mean being able to live anywhere in the world.

Since then he’s managed to remain in Ireland, mostly by choice, but the dream lives on. His passion for writing has never diminished, and to this day he’s happiest when surrounded by books. A computer and science nerd almost from birth, he now writes YA science fiction and spends too much time coming up with new concepts for stories that he’ll get around to writing any day now.

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